


Two Things

by KaseHund



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Language, M/M, as of this morning anyway, tags added as appropriate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 15:46:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12015933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaseHund/pseuds/KaseHund
Summary: Belatedly Hog realized who had done it, who leapt upon his back and wrenched the hammer on the shotgun. Roadhog had shifted, began to heave a mighty shoulder to dislodge them, when the shot firing off directly beside his ear immobilized his efforts and plunged his world into dizzying, screaming silence; stunned as the slug splashed a crater into the sand just to the left of his head. He felt the vibrations more than heard the noise, felt the ejected cartridges cascading off a forearm, while blinking furiously behind cracked lenses trying desperately to get the blurred images to solidify."Junkrat!" He only felt himself roar. Despite the din and chaos the barrel of the rifle shoved under Rat's jaw remained painfully acute in his mind.





	Two Things

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Origins](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8697352) by [Jabberwocky (Sisterwives)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sisterwives/pseuds/Jabberwocky). 



> Yo. Don't often write anything but wanted to take a crack at doing so anyway as a leisure time project, the dirty boys are v important. Takes place post Junkertown exile, pre world-wide crime spree. 
> 
> More to come but no solid update schedule; sorry!

**R** oadhog had only just then sat down to scour thick arms and inked belly with fistfuls of dusty red earth, in lieu of wasting water, when Junkrat launched into a sudden mad bid for his attention. He expected this, truthfully, considering how silent the unruly demolitionist had been for the last quarter hour, having low-key watched his boss hobble in lopsided circles, knead his chin, drum fingers against a hip while Hog checked the badly mangled bodies for survivors and supplies. At least what of them hadn’t been blown to a fine red mist or shredded to wet meat with sizzling shrapnel.

“Oi, Hog. I got me an idea. Mate, Hog. Hog. Roadhog, listen- Hog!”

On his part Roadhog had done an admirable job ignoring Junkrat in favour of post-blitz pick-up, silently staring right up until the point the man legitimately began to scurry up his front; soot-soiled paws, organic and mechanical alike, grabbing for the enforcer’s harness and heaving himself up into Roadhog’s space with ardent disregard. For his unrelenting candor Roadhog rewarded the ungainly junker with a big mitt on his toothy face, a complimentary shove and, as an added bonus, his sought after attention.

“What?” Hog asked as Rat toppled off of him, all boom but no bite.

“I know just how we get ‘em,” Rat began enthusiastically from the dusty ground upon which he’d crashed to his ass, quickly rolling over to one side and scrambling in the dirt for something while speaking. As wont to do Roadhog slid his hands behind him, leaning back for support, and waited quietly for further explanation on what exactly ‘them’ was; rarely privy to Junkrat’s disjointed lines of thought but fairly certain they would, more or less, all wind up on the same page given patience.

A lot of patience.

With a last leggy lunge Junkrat snagged a dented canteen, pried off the severed arm still grasping it, and sprang up off the ground with his prize held in both hands high above his head.

“Behold!”

Hog peered at the canteen with aught but silence and a slow tilt of his head.

“This is the ticket, this’ll get us the big boom,” he promised in a conspiratorial murmur, through a wild toothy grin. Making sure to give the container a good shake, really slosh around the precious water for emphasis, Junkrat lowered the prize and clutched it to his stomach as fondly as any of his cobbled mines.

“Back in Junkertown I knew a bloke. Real cunt, sure as. But clever nonetheless.”

Roadhog yet failed to see the connection but elected not to interrupt, content to sit and watch the younger junker vocalize his thoughts. Verbally and physically work through them with a running mouth and great sweeps of his gangly limbs, spasmodic curling of singed fingers, and the twisting of a sharp face that wore each of his feelings to their extremes. A far cry from the taciturn enforcer he had hired to watch his hide- or what was left of it anyway.

“Fancied himself a chemist or something another…” Junkrat wedged a pinky in one ear, taking more interest in flicking off what was left on it than this Science Man for the moment. Snapping back to it he waggled the canteen at Hog. “Junkers fight tooth and nail and beat each other stupid with their fists, but  _this_  one blew up a whole corner stack with nothing but a liiittle glass bottle and a smile,” Rat provided his own sharp grin and appreciative little sigh of the deed in punctuation.

Initially patience had been in short supply between the pair, more often than not Roadhog had found his hand around Junkrat’s scrawny neck, growling threats about grabby mitts and yowling yaps. At the present point, sitting and waiting, Hog was beginning to understand where this little tirade was going, if only the end result. Perhaps a nuisance and piss poor conversationalist Rat was yet a veritable genius with his traps and explosives, the jerky gestures and manic mood swings sorely belied the mechanical precision in which the flippant junker could execute detonations. He had to have learned how to do it somewhere.

Junkrat crafted his own bombs, rigged his grenades, mixed and molded the lumps of plastic explosives with bits and drops picked up in supply stops existing in the desiccated skeletons of the outback but none of these cobbled outposts had the capacity to serve their Plan’s supply requirements by any stretch of the imagination. His imagination, anyway. Now, Rat’s…

“And?” Roadhog prompted, knowing Junkrat had began to wander around in his own skull as his darting eyes did over the bloody camp.

“Right. Two things,” three fingers. A flourish of his wrist and Rat held up but one grimy pointer. “One. We need water, lots of it, because we want what he’s got, all of it. Only thing he ever traded in was water.” Junkrat never bothered to ask why, clean water was always more valuable than any scrap or shell out here, but this chemist was notorious for dealing in more than any one man could possibly need. At the time Rat was still Jamie and more interested in the bungers he got for nicking a canteen or two anyway.

“And B, I don’t know what happened to him exactly, few years back he pissed on off outta town for one reason or another.”

Probably died. Most people did. Nobody stayed in one another’s life very long, not in the world the ALF had freed for them. Out here, in the irradiated wastes, nothing was more deadly, nothing would kill you quicker, than trust. As such the arrangement between them was a considerable anomaly amongst the cutthroat junker society. The deal had been fifty-fifty and it was one neither expected to last the night. Nor the weeks that followed, the months after that. Most certainly not the loss of limb or the turbulent stretch of incarceration. Yet, through it all, here they were.

“Which is good news for us, mate, seeing as we ain’t exactly about to stroll through the front gates to ask after him any time soon.” Junkrat nodded once, swinging an arm and smugly fixing the glove fit askew on his left hand. “Alls we really need do is roll a couple barrels out to wherever he went, get the goods, then whip up a batch of boom big enough to  _really_  get our point across.” Rat devolved into gleeful giggling before he finished speaking entirely, whispering reverently to himself about his ‘genius’ somewhere along the way.

“So,” Roadhog began after a lengthy pause, mulling over what information Junkrat had offered thus far while looking to one of the dead waste wanderers with her perforated innards having slipped out the gash across her front. She’d been the first foolish enough to charge Hog. “You want to hinge half of the big plan on one person having the supply you need, getting enough clean water to trade for it, and running us around the entire outback to find him. But. You don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

Junkrat blinked at Roadhog owlishly, the two fingers slowly wilting back down to his palm as the implications sunk in and he let the canteen slide from his other hand, clatter to the blood caked dirt that drank of it like a dried sponge.

“Right. Revision!” He announced in a shrill call, snapping fingers then standing to his full height and thrusting a hazard-orange finger skyward- though doing so seemed to thin him out even more at the middle. Hog, absently, mused that just a little farther and one would likely be able to see his spine through his stomach.

“First we figure out if the bloke is still tickin’, do a little investigative research…” Pause to wheedle a look to Hog for reassurance he was on the right track. When his bodyguard said nothing Rat continued full steam with his usual fervent zeal, curling down into himself to tap-tap fingers to their opposites and snap his eyes left and right.

“Then!  _Then_ , provided he ain’t carked it, we figure out where’s the hole he’s dug for himself out here.”

Junkers never returned to civilized society, not really. The sort of people that lived in the outback to begin with were hardy, stubborn folk. Those that didn’t do well with pedantic rules. Those who would not give what little they had left and go quietly as told. Those who would rather raze their own homes, sour the sky, salt the earth, than see her in the cold hands of the omnic invaders. Those like Roadhog.

“Initiate a friendly exchange of supplies.”

_Not likely._  If someone wasn’t looking for a way to take advantage of you somehow, waiting for the opportunity to cut you up and out of the picture and take everything for themselves, they’d already long done it. Friendly, if it even existed in earnest before, had gone out with the Omnium.

“And, finally… mash it all together and shove it right under the Queen’s nose for the biggest, baddest kaboom anyone this side of Oz has ever seen!” Junkrat dramatically concluded, flinging both arms out to either side in small-scale imitation of the massive explosion to come and losing himself to cackling like a mad hyena.

Hog felt as though he had heard this same idea a dozen and then some times, with a tweak here, an addendum there, all to the discordant tune of the young junker’s constant laughter. Rat was full up of half cocked schemes and cobbled plans for just about every endeavour they may need to undertake and prone to hasty revisions on the fly, a necessary trait given the potential and frequency in which things often went ass up. The only problem being that his split second decision making was absolute shit and invariably ruled by his heart over any remotely logical veins of thought. Something Roadhog both hated and, on occasion, appreciated.

“Easy as. Brilliant, really. Whaddya say, Hog?”

The enforcer’s opinion amounted to a rumbling snort, churned hollow through the filters of his stitched mask. Junkrat was immediately tuned in, ember-like eyes snapping to attention at the sound that acted as a ground when he frequently wandered. Roadhog had leaned over to one side, big mitt splayed in the red on red earth, and hefted his bulk back onto steel-toed boots with a rattle of chain and scrap. There, beside the fiery junker, Hog towered, casting a shadow even Junkertown’s worst respected the threat of. Rat, on the other hand, encouragingly, obnoxiously, prodded and papped open palmed at the man’s ample middle for an answer.

“Fine.”

Junkrat vibrated on the spot like a loose engine bolt in a crooked eight block, grin peeling across the entirety of his angular mug as if he’d been born with it, and sprang into the nearby sidecar with a heavy 'oomph’ that quickly devolved into a giddy giggle; the act of unchecked enthusiasm earning his bony elbow a future bruise in complement to those fading under swaths of grease and grime. Long before Roadhog managed to collect their things, launcher, scrap gun, hook, loot, up from the ruddy, parched earth the wiry junker was sitting pretty with hands both metal and flesh patting the sides in a staccato beat of increasing impatience.

Hog rounded the bike in no rush after affixing the dirty duffel to the back, checking straps, looking over tyres, swinging a heavy boot over the low seat and settling with a distressed creak of leather and suspension.

“Oi, Hog, how about'a game?”

Despite the brisk 'No’ Junkrat, foreseeably, continued. Green lights all the way.

“I spy, with my little eye… something beginning with–” Here Junkrat made a show of really considering his critical observation, a painted fingertip pressed to his sharp chin, thick brows lifted near the wildly irregular hairline, a scrutinizing eye sweeping the yawning expanse.

At last he offered, with premeditated finality: “S.”

“Sand,” came the immediate reply, a thrum as deep as the chugging pistons that cracked and thundered to life at the turn of a tarnished key.

“Nah.”

“Sun,” followed after a brief pause and shifting of grip.

Rat only grinned and shook his head like a wet dog, teeth, sharp and crooked, gleamed in the light bleeding from the dying sky.

Roadhog idled for a thoughtful moment and shifted his weight on the leather seat, staring through the circular lenses of his porcine mask at the blurred line of sand and sky; distorted by the long day’s unforgiving heat and radiation-scorched air. When it clicked Hog rolled his eyes.

“That doesn’t count. You can’t see it.”

“Don’t gotta see it, mate, I can  _hear_  it.” Smug little shit, sitting there with a pair of bony digits pressed behind the shell of his ear.

Roadhog forwent pointing out that spying something with one’s eye did in fact require one to see the said object with said eye. He opted instead to grunt, to kick out the metal propping up his chopper- an unnecessary habit that remained even after the acquisition of the sidecar some eight or nine months prior- and twist his wrist forward, quietly delighting in the eager snarl of the horned motorbike ready and raring to tear across the desolate expanse as its rightful lord. And perhaps a little in the strangled noise Rat choked out at the abrupt start.

Though small, hidden from spying little eyes, Hog smiled and urged the bike toward the infinite horizon.


End file.
